The Populist Potential of the US and its Fragile Grip on the International System

Since the end of the Cold War, the position of the United States (US) as the existing hegemon in the international order and its relations with other hegemonic actors and rising challengers have been popular topics of debate among scholars of global politics. Various theories – i.e., hegemonic stability (Webb and Krasner, 1989; Keohane, 1980), sharing hegemony (Schweiss, 2003), and declining hegemony (Boswell, 2004; Lake, 2000) – have been developed, and their proponents have provided answers located between cooperation and conflict with respect to the US’s relations with other hegemonic actors and rising challengers (i.e., China). As a contribution to this literature, this chapter discusses the US and its would-be ability to ‘share hegemony’ in the case of Donald Trump’s populist presidency even though his administration had never shown this intention. Such a debate has become important in American politics because, at the time of this writing, Trump is the leading candidate in the Republican Party primaries for the 2024 presidential election (ABC News, 2023). Sharing hegemony might have worked better among Transatlantic powers under non-populist administrations until the mid-2010s, mainly due to common liberal values, such as democracy, individual freedom, human rights, and respect for the rule of law. However, we must also admit the political and cultural differences between countries on both sides of the Atlantic, including different ideologies on how to run a national economy (while the US has a free-market capitalism blended with pro-corporate government interventions, the European countries have a social welfare capitalism with egalitarian principles) and how to contribute positively to the environment and sustainable development as well as different understandings of human rights (such as the differences in the legality of the death penalty both in the US and EU). But, such political and cultural differences did not necessarily deteriorate the Transatlantic partnership. Rather, they could motivate these powers to share the burden of global security (Schweiss, 2003). This could occur through a division of labor, especially in combating terrorism, where the US is more likely to use hard tools of military, security, and intelligence while Europeans are more likely to focus on the “motivating causes” of terrorism (Singer, 2003) and combine military and non-military tools for peacebuilding (Richmond et al., 2011).

Assessing the would-be ability of the Trump administration to ‘share hegemony’ requires diving into the literature on how populists make foreign policy. Although the literature on populism in comparative politics has grown in recent decades, it is hard to say the same thing for the literature on populism and foreign policy. Several approaches to the study of populism have been developed – i.e., ideational (Mudde, 2004), discursive (Laclau, 2005a; 2005b), stylistic (Moffitt, 2017), and political-strategic approaches (Weyland, 2017) – but no one of them sufficiently captures the impact of populism on foreign policy. Therefore, following Destradi, Cadier, and Plagemann (2021), I employ a pluralistic approach in which all the above-mentioned approaches complement each other to explain the relationship between populism and foreign policy. This approach helps me describe common themes of populist foreign policymaking, which were apparent in the case of Trump, a populist president in the US.

Trump, like any populist president, was (and would be if re-elected) less likely to ‘share hegemony’ not just with other hegemons (i.e., European powers) but also with rising challengers like China because they make foreign policy like a bull in a china shop. Their rise to power comes along with (and is induced by) a rise in nationalism, excessive emphasis on sovereignty, and even “abrasive, narcissistic, provocative, and offensive personalities” (Nai et al., 2019, 609), which bring more instability and uncertainty into national security debates and foreign policymaking processes and creates difficulties in the division of labor necessary for sharing hegemony. Mostly because of the fact, populists are less likely to compromise (Wojczewski, 2020), engage in multilateralism over bilateralism (Biegon, 2019), diversify their foreign relations (Destradi and Plagemann, 2019), and decentralize and depersonalize their foreign policymaking (Drezner, 2019; Müller, 2016). This, in turn, leads countries (including great powers) to follow more isolationist foreign policies (i.e., Trump’s America First policy) and personalized bilateral relations, and results in a general weakening of international diplomacy. Thus, ‘sharing hegemony’ will become an almost impossible task under populist leaders.

The rest of the chapter proceeds as follows. First, I explain the concept of sharing hegemony. Second, I discuss different approaches to populism and explain why I pick a pluralistic approach to study populism and foreign policy. Third, I describe common themes in populist leaders’ foreign policymaking that are exemplified by the Trump administration, which suggest that ‘sharing hegemony’ is impossible for them.

*This article is originally published at E-International Relations. The full version can be found here.